I’m still of the opinion that rockets are a dead-end technology.
If elevators cost a thousand dollars per person per 10 feet, all buildings would use stairs and be limited to 3-4 stories except maybe some emergency systems - like to get a person to the top of a nuclear power plant to fix it before everything blows.
Even at their cheapest, the cost of a rocket per the amount of weight it can get into space is so high that spending new R&D on them is like trying to maximize your buggy whip instead of trying to develop the automobile.
If computer memory cost a dollar a bit, we wouldn’t use it for anything but mission critical systems. Of course it did once cost a dollar a bit, and now it doesn’t, but everywhere in between computers were still useful–it’s just that their domain of applicability was limited.
I think the more general question is this: is there a smooth technological progression such that the current technology can fund development of the next one?
It’s virtually tautological to say that all successful technologies have so far accomplished this. Piston aircraft were successful enough that jet turbines could be developed. Transistors were successful enough that integrated circuits could be developed. Etc.
You can’t just jump to the last step immediately, though (unless someone else did the development already, as is the case for wireless technology in the third world [which largely skipped wired landlines in favor of cell phones]). I don’t think it’s ever happened before, and I don’t see it happening for rockets.
This is why I like reusable rocket technology. Not because it’s a perfect solution, but because it provides a progressive path toward future technologies. Each step lowers costs and expands the market slightly. Once it’s mastered, maybe we can focus on more advanced systems, such air-breathing rocket engines.
One problem with any technological development is that we generally don’t have the slightest clue what the end result will be. Incremental approaches limit the number of experiments we have to run at one time, lowering the costs. One of the current approaches will work better than the others, and that will reset the baseline. From there, second-state reusability will be the goal, and we’ll need another set of experiments to see which approach works best. The strategy works better than sinking massive amounts of money into far-off longshots, none of which necessarily have any chance at success.
The current technology can’t fund doodly-squat. Sure, NASA pays some third parties, but fundamentally, NASA is just spending taxpayer money in the pursuit of pure scientific research. For something to be a profitable, growth industry, it needs to be able to reduce the cost of something (e.g., a resource) or allow us to more efficiently create something (e.g., reduces the resource needs of something) and those something need to be things that people want to purchase. Pure scientific research isn’t a product.
To be sure, if rockets were the only technology we had which had any probability of succeeding, I’d say go ahead and dump money into it. But there are other technologies that are feasible. In the long run, we’re going to have to build a magnetic launcher system or just a damn-tall-structure if space is going to become affordable for integration into our economy as a habitat, as a source of resources, as a tourist destination, or a manufacturing mecca.
So far as I am aware, there’s no belief that we’ll be able to find some magical chemical reaction which is so much more energetic and yet cheaply produced that we can harness it. Reducing all other costs, other than the fuel, still leaves you with most of the cost that we have today.
Rocket technology is already in its last steps. Japanese bullet trains are much more of a first step to building the future of space exploration than rockets are.
SpaceX is currently working on a satellite internet project. They need to launch 4,000 satellites. They’re small (but not that small) and they’ll need dozens (possibly hundreds) of individual launches to place all of them.
To make this work, they need cheaper launches. But they don’t have to be as cheap as a hypothetical space elevator or whatever. Just a little better than what they have now.
Every time you reduce the price, you open up new opportunities. NASA has been a help to SpaceX, but they aren’t the only player.
That’s not necessary. Chemicals are cheap. A Falcon 9–already well priced–costs about $60 M for a no-frills launch. The fuel? Only $200,000.
In other words, launches currently cost 300 times that of the fuel. An F9 launches 13 tonnes into LEO, so the cost of fuel is about $15/kg.
Launches won’t ever get down to just the cost of fuel, but that factor of 300 means they have a long way to go in reducing current prices.